Andy Black
Help people. Get paid. Help more people.
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Scratch your own itch?
(Originally posted in my INSIDERS progress thread here.)
I was recently talking to an AdWords freelancer who was thinking of building a reporting tool for the AdWords data because it would speed up how he works. He also felt it could be a good product for him to work on.
I didn't say it, but felt uneasy about creating a product this way - because you create one of those "scratch your own itch" type of products.
As an AdWords guy/web techie/graphic designer/(insert technical speciality) we can create tools to help us do our job better. And YES, there can definitely be a market out there who would be interested in using or buying that tool.
"Scratch your own itch!" - we hear this a LOT, and it's almost the defacto ideal way to create a product.
I don't like scratching your own itch for the following reasons:
(Originally posted in my INSIDERS progress thread here.)
I was recently talking to an AdWords freelancer who was thinking of building a reporting tool for the AdWords data because it would speed up how he works. He also felt it could be a good product for him to work on.
I didn't say it, but felt uneasy about creating a product this way - because you create one of those "scratch your own itch" type of products.
As an AdWords guy/web techie/graphic designer/(insert technical speciality) we can create tools to help us do our job better. And YES, there can definitely be a market out there who would be interested in using or buying that tool.
"Scratch your own itch!" - we hear this a LOT, and it's almost the defacto ideal way to create a product.
I don't like scratching your own itch for the following reasons:
- It doesn't (directly) help your CURRENT clients/customers - it's helping YOU get better at what you do for them. I've made so much better progress when I focus on serving my customers and not serving myself. Building products to help yourself turns your attention inward. What chances to better server your customers are missed because you've half an eye on building something for yourself?
- Your market now becomes other people who do what you do, rather than the people you currently serve.
- You're now selling shovels instead of using shovels. The people who got the richest in the gold rush weren't the guys selling shovels to the miners - it was the miners who dug up the gold.
- You're entering a market you don't know how to sell to (yet?). Sure, you could crack it, but you're now dividing your attention between two markets. Are you now getting LESS focused?
- Because you are scratching your own itch, is it even easier to seccumb to the belief you already know what your market wants?
- Are you ultimately helping your competitors to serve your current market? Does this mean you're first business is going to suffer if you succeed in your second business?
- We've been trying to better serve our clients/customers.
- They don't want "traffic", they don't want website visitors either. They want calls, that turn into sales. We've been helping them convert the visitors into calls.
- So we've added a new productised service that may end up as a SaaS play (or may not if we choose to continue to serve the DFY market).
- We're creating (mobile first) landing pages for our current AdWords clients, and for totally new clients who were looking for a new website. This is a new add-on service that helps our current market (small businesses that want more calls and sales). And those businesses are biting our hand off for these pages.
- This COMPLEMENTS what we're already selling. This is a cross-sell opportunity for us - a chance to increase our average customer life-time-value.
- We're selling to exactly the same market who we were selling to initially, so we don't have to learn how to reach a new market.
- We don't have the challenge of creating our first route to market for a brand new market, instead we have the opportunity to create ANOTHER route to market for the market we already serve.
- New clients of the landing page service can be cross-sold to the AdWords service. New clients of the AdWords service can be cross-sold to the landing page service.
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